The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

With the only other difference that your quoted newsblurb is wrong on the ROP amount obviously.

R580:
16 * 4 z * 650MHz = 41600

41600 * 2.5 = 104000

16 * 8 z * 814MHz = 104192

The former thingy translated: http://translate.google.com/transla...&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=/language_tools

speaks of 5 operations per ALU/clock (4+1); sounds rather like Vec4+scalar to me.

 

Well I really don't see how an assumption that R600 is slower is any more valid than one that it's faster For all we know it could be faster in 1xAA and take a lower 4xAA perf hit!

Of course not, but G80 isn't a TBDR, right? Efficiency matters yes but come on, do you really think efficiency differences between two IMR's is going to play a significant part with a 40+GB/s bandwidth discrepency? I really don't see how the assumption that R600 is less efficient holds any water either. What we expect is for R600 to have ridiculous amounts of bandwidth. All the assumptions that it's less efficient or can't make effective use of its extra bandwidth are just mitigating factors against the stomping of G80 that some expect!

 

Pick your poison and lay your hand into an open fire for your choice then

I didn't say or imply that R600 is or might be less efficient. Amongst many other factors you need a specific amount of ROPs, TMUs and what not to make use of the exsessive bandwidth. All indications point so far at 16/8z ROPs for R600. No idea about TMUs to be honest, but if you attempt some reverse speculative math you have 24/8z ROPs@575MHz and 32 TMUs@575MHz on G80, which should show in today's scenarios severe bandwidth limitations.

My lucky guess is rather that ATI didn't want to take two steps like NV in order to go from 256 to 512bits.

Last but not least if I'd assume ~50% bandwidth it rarely translates into something even close to a 50% average increase if all other factors aren't increased by the same persentage. My only other point for the past few posts is that bandwidth alone won't be able to perform any wonders. Or if a living example would help, how much performance increase did the 1GHz ram bring the R580+ compared to the R580 and in which corner cases exactly?

 

I think that's a little bit simplistic. If you have a high level of anisotropic filtering enabled then sure, mip-maps are preferable to sparkle. But if you haven't got high-level AF then I, for one, find the presence of no-mipmap-sparkle much less objectionable than the combination of too-blurry textures and the "bow wave" effect that you see as the mipmap boundaries move along the ground ahead of you.

 

Ah but we don't know what each ROP can do so sterile counts don't tell us much

Could be but if rumours of 2Ghz+ GDDR4 are trrue then are they just going for the marketing bang?

Yeah you're right, an R600 that isn't significantly faster than G80 in 1xAA probably won't benefit to the tune of its 50% bandwidth advantage once AA is turned on. R580+ didn't do much with its extra bandwidth IIRC. Hopefully R600 does something with all that bandwidth though.

 

Former newsblurb mentioned 2.5x times more Z-fillrate compared to R580.

You mean =/>1GHz (effective =/>2000 DDR)? Jokes aside why the heck not? I wouldn't be surprised to see utterly laughable creative math marketing stunts along that. And yes it's a perfectly logical answer to the creative math NV pushed with G80's specs.

Since G80 supports only up to 8xMSAA (the only real comparable mode should R600 support higher sample densities), that combined with 8x transparency supersampling should give the R600 always IMHLO a healthy boost ahead. All it takes is a healthy amount of alpha test textures in a test scene. And I'm only speculating in that direction because it's my impression that Supersampling eats more bandwidth in it's current form than anything else and isn't being compressed as MSAA.

 

TheINQ says Quad GBU CrossFire.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37484

 

Yes, there was an issue with AA and the driver, so no AA was applied, and there's no in-game AF level control. I'm fairly sure I did mention that there was a bug, but it seems I didn't. Just an oversight, nothing suspicious.

 

There was an issue with AA and Company of Heroes on all graphics cards, and from what I can tell so far it still doesn't appear that AA is being applied (performance was impacted, though) with the latest drivers and game patch, at least not in the built-in Performance Test. I'll get a closer look at it when I can, and check out Xbit Labs' benchmark method.

 

What am i missing here? R580 with quad-pumped ROPs?

What do you think on this: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/?menu=forum&s=thread&bid=421&tid=5451996&mid=5452060#5452060
A bit on the conservative side, but then - why would Ati waste so many transistors on their X1K test vehicle?

 

You quoted the Inq in your first post? Damn...that's daring.

You meant quad GPU, right? Did anyone ever doubt this would happen? When all those lovely new motherboards started appearing the first thing I suspected was more videocards, or an additional card for the GPU/Physics processing (as we've all heard). Hope a reliable source can actually confirm QCF (Quad CrossFire?), and/or provide some more details.

 

Well, I'm laughing. That is totally, totally nonsensical.

 

Yeah, secretly all R5X cards are DX10, we just don't know it yet!

 

It is labeled as an unconfirmed rumour/speculation, though.

 

Sounds legit to me?

 

Nope, i doesn't.

They keep referring to R600 as a simple doubling of the R580, but the R580 is not unified.
In addition to the 48 Pixel Shader ALU's, there are also 8 Vertex Shaders.

In a unified architecture, those "96" ALU's would have to be doing that additional work, not to mention Geometry Shading, new for the DX10 API.

 

You just spoiled the catalyst 7.3 launch headline

 

Hi I have UPDATE: It seems that tests from level505 were just confirmed link: http://www.ddworld.cz/graficke-karty/atir600-alias-ati-radeon-x2800xtx-testy-potvrzeny.html
Its in czech. BTW I know this guy and his info is most of the time very reliable - according to this info tests were done by someone from Microsoft with WEAKER version of X2800XTX on very early drivers which were modified by tester.

 

Don't laugh!

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=633078&postcount=90